Update: McAfee Launches Unlimited Online Backups

McAfee on Friday announced an unlimited backup service that the security company will make available to its customers via an annual subscription.

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McAfee on Friday announced an unlimited backup service that the security company will make available to its customers via an annual subscription.

McAfee also announced that the company will roll out an online support forum during the fourth quarter where consumers can help each other find solutions to support problems.

Powered by Mozy's backup infrastructure, the McAfee Online Backup service will be priced at $59.99 per PC per year for U.S. consumers, and will run for one year. Users will be granted unlimited file space to back up their data, although the performance to and from the service will depend on the user's ISP, McAfee noted. McAfee announced its plans to sign up with Mozy, an EMC subsidiary, in June.

The files will be encrypted and remotely stored, and can be restored in
the event of a data loss, McAfee said. Backups will take place at
user-managed intervals. The service will perform incremental backups, looking for which files were updated since the last backup.

The new service will work with McAfee's security products, as well as suites from other vendors, McAfee said.

McAfee's other Web service will be an online support forum, which will
be powered by Jive Software. McAfee did not disclose a site name for
the forum, which Tracy Ross, a McAfee company spokeswoman, said would
launch in October.

However, Greg Sanders, director of global online services for McAfee, said that the company would probably repurpose community.mcafee.com, although the company hasn't made a final decision yet. Sections for home and office, enterprise, and security awareness (with content from Avert Labs) will be part of the site, Sanders said in an interview.

Ross said that the McAfee forum would complement its existing support
services,not replace them. "We're finding that a lot of consumers are
moving to social media, and want to go to online and online support to
try and find a simple fix," Ross said.

"We're not doing this to cut costs," Sanders added.

The support forum will be moderated, and customers will have the opportunity to provide feedback and ask questions, which McAfee personnel can and will reply to, Sanders said. Customers will also be able to make suggestions for upcoming products and services.

"Our goal is to interact with customers as well as get direct feedback from them," Sanders said.

This story was updated at 10:48 AM PDT with additional comments from McAfee's Sanders and additional details on the backup service.

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